Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Water

    Water is wet. Conventionally. Closer inspection may reveal various problems with water being wet; too little water may not merit the label wet, if one catches a bit of spray from a wave, and with too much water generally one is underwater, only becoming wet after emerging like Godzilla from Tokyo Bay. Something about a towel being important. There's a sensory apparatus involved; is a ribcage wet? Or are those rocks wet? They might only appear to be wet because of a special coating and the angle of the sun coming through the clouds. Does the sky wet, or is it doing something else involving the same amounts of water that located and sensed elsewhere would get tagged as wet? The wetness of soapy water could be completely out of mind as one tries to get that water out of the eyes, or completely in mind as each paw is diligently shook after each step.

  • Why I ran then and why I run now

    When I was a child, there was one domain in which my grades would really crash, to my disappointment and the one of my parents. Sports. I am and was not talented at all with throwing, dribbling, catching,etc... balls of any kind. And such sports dominated most of our Physical Education.

    As my body also was quite small for my age, I was usually one of the last picked, when teams were organised, no matter the sport. It was never a good feeling. A part of me tried to not resent it. I tried to understand that it was not personal, it was a strategical choice made for a team. Another part of me boiled to prove myself. Yet another knew that I would fail and because of that, I did not belong and did not deserve to be here.

  • Another year has passed

    Its late, i am on my way home after a too long day of work, but instead of going directly to wife and child (who are surely sound asleep by now) i take a short stop at the pub. It has been a while, and as i walk through the door i see many new faces. Sitting at the counter i ask for a Guinnes and begin to talk to everyone who wants to listen:

    Its crazy to think that another year has passed, if you would ask me, i would say the last christmas was only a couple of months ago. And what a year this was!

    Last year at this time our son could barely walk, today he not only runs and climbs but begins to speak in 2 - 3 word sentences.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Programming

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 14

      In part 2, I first tried printing all of the configurations and then grepping for horizontal lines, but that was too slow.

      I then tried looking for contiguous horizontal lines in the code (instead of in an external pipeline). I did this with a recursive check at every coordinate, which made the check quadratic in the number of coordinates.

      It only got faster when I checked pairs of adjacent coordinates instead of entire contiguous lines. This made the check linear in the number of coordinates.

      For the threshold, I first picked 200 and then checked the result by manual inspection. It turns out that in my input, there were 268 horizontal adjacencies in the target frame, which was the first value greater than 66.

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 15

      In part 2, I found it hard to get the recursion right. I also had a bug where I didn’t return a copy of the original lines, but a modified version (even in the unsuccessful case), and another bug where I had a : instead of an =, but the interpreter didn’t complain.

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 19

      I like how you only had to replace the disjunction with an addition for part 2 (which, in some notations, even use the same symbol, namely the plus sign).